Read Therapy for Free Online Page A

experienced myself. My sexual history was a very slim volume, consisting of isolated, opportunistic couplings with garrison slags in the Army, with drunken girls at drama-school parties, and with lonely landladies in seedy theatrical digs. I don’t think I had sex with any of them more than twice, and it was always fairly quick and in the missionary position. To enjoy sex you need comfort — clean sheets, firm mattresses, warm bedrooms — and continuity. Sally and I learned about making love together, more or less from scratch. If she were to go with anyone else, something new in her behaviour, some unfamiliar adjustment of her limbs, some variation in her caresses, would tell me, I’m certain. I always have trouble with adultery stories, especially those where one partner has been betraying the other for years. How could you not know? Of course, Sally doesn’t know about Amy. But then I’m not having an affair with Amy. What am I having with her? I don’t know.
     
    I met Amy six years ago when she was hired to help cast the first series of The People Next Door. Needless to say, she did a brilliant job. Some people in the business reckon that ninety per cent of the success of a sitcom is in the casting. As a writer I would question that, naturally, but it’s true that the best script in the world won’t work if the actors are all wrong. And the right ones are not always everybody’s obvious first choice. It was Amy’s idea, for instance, to cast Deborah Radcliffe as Priscilla, the middle-class mother — a classical actress who’d just been let go by the Royal Shakespeare, and had never done sitcom before in her life. Nobody except Amy would have thought of her for Priscilla, but she took to the part like a duck to water. Now she’s a household name and can earn five grand for a thirty-second commercial.
    It’s a funny business, casting. It’s a gift, like fortune-telling or water-divining, but you also need a trained memory. Amy has a mind like a Rolodex: when you ask her advice about casting a part she goes into a kind of trance, her eyes turn up to the ceiling, and you can almost hear the fllick-flick-flick inside her head as she spools through that mental card-index where the essence of every actor and actress she has ever seen is inscribed. When Amy goes to see a show, she’s not just watching the actors perform their given roles, she’s imagining them all the time in other roles, so that by the end of the evening she’s assimilated not only their performance on the night, but also their potential for quite other performances. You might go with Amy to see Macbeth at the RSC and say to her on the way home, “Wasn’t Deborah Radcliffe a great Lady Macbeth?” and she’d say, “Mmm, I’d love to see her do Judith Bliss in Hay Fever.” I wonder sometimes whether this habit of mind doesn’t prevent her from enjoying what’s going on in front of her. Perhaps that’s what we have in common — neither of us being able to live in the present, always hankering after some phantom of perfection elsewhere.
    I put this to her once. “Balls, darling,” she said. “With the greatest respect, complete cojones. You forget that every now and again I pull it off. I achieve the perfect fit between actor and role. Then I enjoy the show and nothing but the show. I live for those moments. So do you, for that matter. I mean when everything in an episode goes exactly right. You sit in front of the telly holding your breath thinking, they can’t possibly keep this up, it’s going to dip in a moment, but they do, and it doesn’t — that’s what it’s all about, n’est ce pas ?”
    “I can’t remember when I thought an episode was that good,” I said.
    “What about the fumigation one?”
    “Yes, the fumigation one was good.”
    “It was bloody brilliant.”
    That’s what I like about Amy — she’s always pumping up my self-esteem. Sally’s style is more bracing: stop moping and get on with your life.